I've seen quite a few SMR proposals over the last couple of years and not a single one that dared to address the whole cycle from deployment to eventual decommission as a function of the total revenues - costs to operate. Most of these projects seem to be made to bilk investors or governments rather than to actually produce power. The day Italy produces the first KWh that is net profitable to the operators without counting subsidies I will be highly amazed, and that's assuming they get to operational in the first place.
I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in China and Russia.
That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
An energy source with an EROI of 20 but which requires thousands of highly skilled people to tend it is going to lose to an energy source with an EROI of 15 that sits in a field and just works for 30 years.
30 years is generally the guarantee for some minimum output so it's the floor too... could still be outputting 60-70% of original spec for 50 years
It turns out that economic cost of labor and inputs also factors into energy considerations. It's rather soft thinking to ignore them, and leads to very bad conclusions.
Why use a bad metric when one can use the actually relevant metrics?
I see this from nuclear advocates when they talk about "energy density". Energy density (or EROI) are only relevant insofar as they affect cost. Why not just use cost? (The answer is that cost isn't giving the nuclear advocates the answer they want, so they have to lie and use some substitute metric.)
Not if you factor in all the residual. Adding to fossil or water based grid is okay, running on its own with all the necessary residual it gets way worse.
EROI of 5 means 20% all energy goes just to preserving current status. As wind is limited this gives hard limits to what is sustainable in northern countries. These problems completely disappear with nuclear.
Some people have irrational exuberance around nuclear technologies, and the numbers in that overly long explanation are an example of that. $5B for 1GW of nuclear?! HAH!
There's a systematic bias among all energy professionals to both vastly underestimate the cost of building nuclear, and overestimate the cost of solar, wind, and storage.
Go back 5 or 10 years, look at the numbers projected, and it's just wild. I've never seen any other industry where there's such a mass hallucination among people that otherwise consider themselves "serious people."
Look at LFSCOE instead of LCOE. The electric grid can absorb a bit of intermittency relatively cheaply, but then you need to account for the system costs.
Or LACE, or Lazard's "Cost of Firming Intermittency" or whatever metric you want...
The systematic bias against renewables and irrational exuberance around nuclear is true across all of those metrics.
Even people that make their living on renewables underestimate how quickly it gets cheap. Jenny Chase, famous for pointing out that people underestimate the pace of solar technology, also underestimates solar technology.
I've seen "just slap a battery onto a steel mill to make it work with solar." So what? People on every side are saying dumb things. The required restructuring of the grid makes wind + storage + peaker plants + solar not so dominant as you picture it. Some countries can have it cheaper without nuclear, some not.
> Some countries can have it cheaper without nuclear, some can't.
From what I've seen, some countries have renewables comparable to nuclear for baseload power, at least for now, but in no country is new construction nuclear cheaper.
Those countries where nuclear does best will be energy ghettos in the post fossil age, as they will be competing with countries (typically sunny places closer to the equator) with cheap renewables.
I've yet to see any serious engineer make the argument that Li-ion batteries will be used for seasonal storage. I've more often seen it used as a straw man argument against renewables.
I've seen calculations for Denmark that has great offshore wind power potential[1]. They indeed don't need nuclear. The lowest cost mix is offshore wind power (66%), combined cycle gas turbine (26%), and solar PV (8%).
Solar photovoltaic is so low thanks to its intermittency. The more solar you have as a percentage of the total production the more costly it gets. At the limit of 100% solar its SLCOE is almost twice as high as nuclear.
So, the availability and the quality (offshore wind is less variable, causes less backlash and so on) of wind power resources plays a big role.
He mixed some units there, mostly by translating Chinese costs into OECD/USA costs. China does indeed take 5 years to build a reactor. That's what happens when you build a couple a year for decades. After 20 years, that might be true in the OECD/USA too, but for now you are looking at over 10 years, $10B/GW, and over 8% interest.
None of that is the real issue though. The real issue is for at least 8 hours a day, but probably more like 16 hours a day, renewables can generate power at well under 1/2 the price of what he calculated. So they won't sell the 9 units of power he forecast - it will be at best 4.5 units, and the nuclear plant even at his optimistic assumptions never makes money.
If you look at South Australia [0] - they are at 80% renewables now. At 80%, the average wholesale is cheaper than what nuclear can supply. The percentage will go higher, probably to around 90%..95%. They are and will achieve that with very limited (ie, cheap) storage.
But obviously that isn't 100% - so it becomes a question of what can fill the gap of 60 days or so a year the cheapest. Nuclear has no hope. Generating and storing ammonia using excess renewables and burning it when needed is one of the most expensive forms of energy available - but if you only need to do it for 60 days a year, it is still far cheaper than nuclear, because nuclear's primary cost is it's interest bill, not fuel.
The good professor paints gas fuel cost as a disadvantage. But when you are only burning it 60 days a year, then compared to paying nuclear's interest bill 365 days a year it's cheap.
This really should be a top level comment. It accurately explains the broken economics of nuclear, and is the real reason effectively no nukes will be built going forward. Not the usual tired points about regulations and safety fears and Chernobyl or whatever
Precisely. France built out its current nuclear fleet over decades. The first reactors were expensive, but then costs came down. Of course, then they stopped and are now trying to restart again with new reactor models. It's been expensive and it's not clear they'll start building en-mass again.
France's reactors became successively more expensive as the need for more layered safety features was exposed. The first generation (CP0, CP1, CP2) was quite inexpensive, the P4 and P'4 designs were already more expensive and the N4 was yet more expensive.
At this point I think if you want inexpensive nuclear, you just have to accept some risk. Going from 99.9% safety to 99.99% adds just too much complexity to remain economically viable.
This must at least partly be region-dependent right?
In the darker northern parts of Europe, the German transition to renewable haven't really been a cost-saving success story (right?).
From my (very) casual Swedish vantage point, the wind build out here was a very government subsided race to zero marginal prices that barely helped anything?
Most of Finnish wind capacity was built without subsidies. The demand was saturated at ~25% of total generation, after which the market started building solar. Wind power is more cost-effective at these latitudes, but solar generation is currently more valuable, as it correlates less with existing renewables.
That only makes sense if you're burning hydrocarbons to heat your homes; about 1/3 of total energy use is space heating. Shifting to heat pumps and more wind before wasting money on solar panels at high latitudes is better ROI on energy independence and carbon reduction.
Heat pumps already became popular a long time ago. Electricity is so widely used for heating, that the difference in electricity consumption between the coldest winter days and July nights is almost 2.5x. While there are some old legends of Finnish (or maybe Sami) wind wizards, we still haven't figured out how to generate wind power on demand.
In any case, it's up to the market. If you believe it's possible to make money with wind / solar / nuclear power in Finland, you should be able to get permits in a reasonable time. Right now, those building solar are investing more than the others.
Which should we expect will find more cost reductions in the next couple decades? Nuclear or battery storage?
Looked at it that way, I'm skeptical of all these new nuclear projects. No one has made SMRs work economically, yet we're seeing incredible improvements in batteries, and there's enough unexplored chemistry possibilities we don't have a reason to think we're near the end of the road on that.
There's also very interesting work on non-battery storage technology. The one that has gotten my attention is Standard Thermal's "hot dirt" thermal storage technology. I don't know where they are in crossing the chasm on this, but the theory looks very promising, with capex as low as $0.10 per kWh of thermal storage capacity. This promises to make 600 C heat available 365/7/24 for a cost as low as $3/GJ, similar to heat from combustion of Henry Hub natural gas.
So France's emission intensity is 1/5 that of SA.
SA has a population of 1.9 M. France is at 69.1 M. SA is physically larger than metropolitan France ( 983 km^2 vs 549 for France). It is very sunny. It is rich and solar has been subsidised for ages.
It is really ideal for solar.
But the emissions are still much higher than France.
Australia is ideal for solar in general and the government has been giving money to millionaires all over the country to put it on their roofs.
But most of Australia, with the exception of Tasmania that uses hydro, has fairly high emissions.
Australia's emissions have also been effectively flat for the past half decade :
> China does indeed take 5 years to build a reactor.
I've seen it claimed that this figure is not equivalent to the time-to-build in West, as the clock starts later in the process. I don't know if that's true, but I've seen the claim.
jacquesm · · focus · HN ↗
asmodeuslucifer · · focus · HN ↗
That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
Hammershaft · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
Here's an Illinois professor going through the economics compared to a gas plant.
Nuclear power can become dramatically cheaper than other energy sources in the long run.
looofooo0 · · focus · HN ↗
rgmerk · · focus · HN ↗
An energy source with an EROI of 20 but which requires thousands of highly skilled people to tend it is going to lose to an energy source with an EROI of 15 that sits in a field and just works for 30 years.
micromacrofoot · · focus · HN ↗
looofooo0 · · focus · HN ↗
micromacrofoot · · focus · HN ↗
looofooo0 · · focus · HN ↗
looofooo0 · · focus · HN ↗
epistasis · · focus · HN ↗
looofooo0 · · focus · HN ↗
pfdietz · · focus · HN ↗
I see this from nuclear advocates when they talk about "energy density". Energy density (or EROI) are only relevant insofar as they affect cost. Why not just use cost? (The answer is that cost isn't giving the nuclear advocates the answer they want, so they have to lie and use some substitute metric.)
looofooo0 · · focus · HN ↗
pfdietz · · focus · HN ↗
looofooo0 · · focus · HN ↗
pfdietz · · focus · HN ↗
EROI cannot be bad, since energy is only a small part of the cost of manufacturing. If EROI was unacceptable, then overall cost would be too.
looofooo0 · · focus · HN ↗
pfdietz · · focus · HN ↗
looofooo0 · · focus · HN ↗
epistasis · · focus · HN ↗
There's a systematic bias among all energy professionals to both vastly underestimate the cost of building nuclear, and overestimate the cost of solar, wind, and storage.
Go back 5 or 10 years, look at the numbers projected, and it's just wild. I've never seen any other industry where there's such a mass hallucination among people that otherwise consider themselves "serious people."
red75prime · · focus · HN ↗
epistasis · · focus · HN ↗
The systematic bias against renewables and irrational exuberance around nuclear is true across all of those metrics.
Even people that make their living on renewables underestimate how quickly it gets cheap. Jenny Chase, famous for pointing out that people underestimate the pace of solar technology, also underestimates solar technology.
red75prime · · focus · HN ↗
pfdietz · · focus · HN ↗
From what I've seen, some countries have renewables comparable to nuclear for baseload power, at least for now, but in no country is new construction nuclear cheaper.
Those countries where nuclear does best will be energy ghettos in the post fossil age, as they will be competing with countries (typically sunny places closer to the equator) with cheap renewables.
pfdietz · · focus · HN ↗
Those arguments typically assume Li-ion batteries will be used for seasonal storage, which is a completely clown argument.
esarbe · · focus · HN ↗
pfdietz · · focus · HN ↗
pfdietz · · focus · HN ↗
red75prime · · focus · HN ↗
Solar photovoltaic is so low thanks to its intermittency. The more solar you have as a percentage of the total production the more costly it gets. At the limit of 100% solar its SLCOE is almost twice as high as nuclear.
So, the availability and the quality (offshore wind is less variable, causes less backlash and so on) of wind power resources plays a big role.
[1] <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544226009837" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
ivo_sheets · · focus · HN ↗
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rstuart4133 · · focus · HN ↗
None of that is the real issue though. The real issue is for at least 8 hours a day, but probably more like 16 hours a day, renewables can generate power at well under 1/2 the price of what he calculated. So they won't sell the 9 units of power he forecast - it will be at best 4.5 units, and the nuclear plant even at his optimistic assumptions never makes money.
If you look at South Australia [0] - they are at 80% renewables now. At 80%, the average wholesale is cheaper than what nuclear can supply. The percentage will go higher, probably to around 90%..95%. They are and will achieve that with very limited (ie, cheap) storage.
But obviously that isn't 100% - so it becomes a question of what can fill the gap of 60 days or so a year the cheapest. Nuclear has no hope. Generating and storing ammonia using excess renewables and burning it when needed is one of the most expensive forms of energy available - but if you only need to do it for 60 days a year, it is still far cheaper than nuclear, because nuclear's primary cost is it's interest bill, not fuel.
The good professor paints gas fuel cost as a disadvantage. But when you are only burning it 60 days a year, then compared to paying nuclear's interest bill 365 days a year it's cheap.
[0] <a href="https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/consumers/energy-grid-and-supply/our-electricity-supply-and-market" rel="nofollow">https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/consumers/energy-grid-and...
dalyons · · focus · HN ↗
dukeyukey · · focus · HN ↗
* Incredibly sunny
* Incredibly sparely populated
* Functionally winterless
Like it's the perfect setup for solar.
Somewhere like Denmark, Japan, even the US Northeast does not have those.
MomsAVoxell · · focus · HN ↗
A long, not insurmountable, cable strings its way across the gap and into Europes tender bits, i.e Spain and Turkey/etc.
Electrons, once redirected/collected, can be redirected far.
Heck, at scale, probably a lot of it could be done with microwave, anyway ..
hylaride · · focus · HN ↗
esarbe · · focus · HN ↗
At this point I think if you want inexpensive nuclear, you just have to accept some risk. Going from 99.9% safety to 99.99% adds just too much complexity to remain economically viable.
filleokus · · focus · HN ↗
In the darker northern parts of Europe, the German transition to renewable haven't really been a cost-saving success story (right?).
From my (very) casual Swedish vantage point, the wind build out here was a very government subsided race to zero marginal prices that barely helped anything?
jltsiren · · focus · HN ↗
coryrc · · focus · HN ↗
jltsiren · · focus · HN ↗
In any case, it's up to the market. If you believe it's possible to make money with wind / solar / nuclear power in Finland, you should be able to get permits in a reasonable time. Right now, those building solar are investing more than the others.
jasonwatkinspdx · · focus · HN ↗
Looked at it that way, I'm skeptical of all these new nuclear projects. No one has made SMRs work economically, yet we're seeing incredible improvements in batteries, and there's enough unexplored chemistry possibilities we don't have a reason to think we're near the end of the road on that.
sorenbs · · focus · HN ↗
pfdietz · · focus · HN ↗
sien · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/AU-SA/yearly" rel="nofollow">https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/AU-SA/yearly
France is at 32 gC02eq/kWh for 2025.
So France's emission intensity is 1/5 that of SA.
SA has a population of 1.9 M. France is at 69.1 M. SA is physically larger than metropolitan France ( 983 km^2 vs 549 for France). It is very sunny. It is rich and solar has been subsidised for ages.
It is really ideal for solar.
But the emissions are still much higher than France.
Australia is ideal for solar in general and the government has been giving money to millionaires all over the country to put it on their roofs.
But most of Australia, with the exception of Tasmania that uses hydro, has fairly high emissions.
Australia's emissions have also been effectively flat for the past half decade :
<a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/measuring-what-matters/measuring-what-matters-themes-and-indicators/sustainable/emissions-reduction" rel="nofollow">https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/measuring-what-matters/mea...
This is despite increasing solar.
rstuart4133 · · focus · HN ↗
pfdietz · · focus · HN ↗
I've seen it claimed that this figure is not equivalent to the time-to-build in West, as the clock starts later in the process. I don't know if that's true, but I've seen the claim.